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THE CALLING OF THE GRAVE
by Simon Beckett
Bantam, February 2011
336 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0593063457


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Forensic anthropologist, Dr David Hunter, is called out to Dartmoor to advise police on the body of a girl found in a grave out on the moors. She is believed to have been a victim of serial rapist and murderer, Jerome Monk, who preyed on vulnerable teenagers and in one case actually took two victims from the same family, twins whose bodies have never been found.

Monk is temporarily released from prison having finally expressed a willingness to lead police to the graves of his victims but things don't go according to plan as the investigating officer seems determined to ignore the advice of one of his own experts and Hunter watches as Monk almost succeeds in escaping and the attempt to recover the bodies ends in abrupt failure

Eight years later, Monk finally manages to escape from prison and seems intent on tracking down those people involved in the abortive body recovery on the deserted moorland. A cry for help from someone Hunter barely knew takes him back to the scene of the crime and he soon finds himself caught up in a messy collision between the past and the present.

For someone brought up in the shadow cast over the north of England by the Moors Murders in the 1960s as I was, this book held a particular fascination both in the description of the methods used to search for bodies and in its setting in the bleak landscape of Dartmoor, which could very easily have doubled for the equally grim Lancashire moors of my own childhood, even down to the old mine workings littering the landscape. The effect on the family of being unable to find the body of a murdered child is starkly drawn in a brief meeting with the mother of two of the missing girls and an air of understated but very palpable menace hangs over the whole book.

This was a well-paced and gripping novel that combined the provision of some back story for what is now clearly a well-established main character, without in any way slowing down or unduly encumbering the narrative, so I think it will work well both for those familiar with the series and others, like me, coming to the life and work of Dr David Hunter for the first time. I was even sufficiently caught up in the characters and the plot to be able to forgive the occasional liberty taken by the author with the geology of the area.

§ Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.

Reviewed by Linda Wilson, March 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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